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But see also: > In particular, I’m still conflicted about whether all those type system extensions were warranted. Certainly immutability helped with things fa

But see also: > In particular, I’m still conflicted about whether all those type system extensions were warranted. Certainly immutability helped with things far beyond safe concurrency. And so did the side-effect annotations, as they commonly helped to root out bugs caused by unintended side-effects. The future for our industry is a massively distributed one, however, where you want simple individual components composed into a larger fabric. In this world, individual nodes are less “precious”, and arguably the correctness of the overall orchestration will become far more important. I do think this points to a more Go-like approach, with a focus on the RPC mechanisms connecting disparate pieces.

kibwen 10y ago
I don't think this is incompatible with Rust's goal, which is to bring safety to the sort of low-level domain where C is currently dominant and systems can't afford to be structured as isolated nodes communicating only via RPC. In contrast, Midori was aimed at a higher-level general-purpose domain, like Go (and Erlang, too, which is even better than Go at the "cluster of nodes" approach, yet doesn't have a type system at all).
- k__ 10y ago
  Could it be, that many desicions for Rust have been made to make it more appealing to C devs? Like, opting out of purity annotations or forced immutability? I'm not saying these desicions are good or bad, I don't know much about system programming. But I often ask myself what the main motivators for a language are.
  - tupshin 10y ago
    FWIW,after spending a couple of years with rust as my primary programming language, I'm convinced that they made the right decision wrt mutability (immutable by default, but mutability availale when needed), as rust's lifetime system eliminates nearly all the remaining pain points around mutability (data races). On the other hand, I think it is very important that some notion of purity be incorporated, even if only as an opt-in.
    - k__ 10y ago
      > spending a couple of years with rust as my primary programming language Oh, how did you achieve that? :)
      - Groxx 10y ago
        Probably not with too much difficulty. 1.0's alpha was nearly 2 years ago. The github repo goes back to mid 2010: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors
        steveklabnik 10y ago
        See also https://github.com/graydon/rust-prehistory https://github.com/graydon/rust-prehistory
        k__ 10y ago
        I didn't want to imply that Rust is to young for people to have been spending years using it. I wanted to know how you could get a Rust-job (using it as primary programming language) today :)
        steveklabnik 10y ago
        Ah. So, most organizations using Rust in production are moving existing employees over or hiring more generally. I'd hit up these people: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html
  - jackmott 10y ago
    Forced immutability has enormous performance downsides in some cases. Rust can't have that.
masklinn 10y ago
That's really interesting in that the Rust developers ended up falling on the side of "no". Immutability is contextual (depending on the type of reference you hold) and purity annotations ended up being completely removed.
- continuational 10y ago
  I'm wondering why the `mut` keyword is named the way it is when you can still have "interior" mutability regardless of whether you have a `mut` reference or not. Shouldn't it be called `unique` instead?
  - FreeFull 10y ago
    The mut keyword on variable bindings doesn't influence uniqueness at all, though. You're probably thinking about the `&mut` references vs the `&` references.
  - steveklabnik 10y ago
    What my sibling said, but also, this almost happened. It's called "the mutapocalpyse". See here: http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/05/13/focusing-on-ownership/ http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/05/13/focu... In the end, we decided that these are two equivalent perspectives, and decided to stick with the more traditional mutable/immutable distinction.

kibwen 10y ago

I don't think this is incompatible with Rust's goal, which is to bring safety to the sort of low-level domain where C is currently dominant and systems can't afford to be structured as isolated nodes communicating only via RPC. In contrast, Midori was aimed at a higher-level general-purpose domain, like Go (and Erlang, too, which is even better than Go at the "cluster of nodes" approach, yet doesn't have a type system at all).

k__ 10y ago
Could it be, that many desicions for Rust have been made to make it more appealing to C devs? Like, opting out of purity annotations or forced immutability? I'm not saying these desicions are good or bad, I don't know much about system programming. But I often ask myself what the main motivators for a language are.
- tupshin 10y ago
  FWIW,after spending a couple of years with rust as my primary programming language, I'm convinced that they made the right decision wrt mutability (immutable by default, but mutability availale when needed), as rust's lifetime system eliminates nearly all the remaining pain points around mutability (data races). On the other hand, I think it is very important that some notion of purity be incorporated, even if only as an opt-in.
  - k__ 10y ago
    > spending a couple of years with rust as my primary programming language Oh, how did you achieve that? :)
    - Groxx 10y ago
      Probably not with too much difficulty. 1.0's alpha was nearly 2 years ago. The github repo goes back to mid 2010: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/graphs/contributors
      - steveklabnik 10y ago
        See also https://github.com/graydon/rust-prehistory https://github.com/graydon/rust-prehistory
        k__ 10y ago
        I didn't want to imply that Rust is to young for people to have been spending years using it. I wanted to know how you could get a Rust-job (using it as primary programming language) today :)
        steveklabnik 10y ago
        Ah. So, most organizations using Rust in production are moving existing employees over or hiring more generally. I'd hit up these people: https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/friends.html
- jackmott 10y ago
  Forced immutability has enormous performance downsides in some cases. Rust can't have that.

masklinn 10y ago

That's really interesting in that the Rust developers ended up falling on the side of "no". Immutability is contextual (depending on the type of reference you hold) and purity annotations ended up being completely removed.

continuational 10y ago
I'm wondering why the `mut` keyword is named the way it is when you can still have "interior" mutability regardless of whether you have a `mut` reference or not. Shouldn't it be called `unique` instead?
- FreeFull 10y ago
  The mut keyword on variable bindings doesn't influence uniqueness at all, though. You're probably thinking about the `&mut` references vs the `&` references.
- steveklabnik 10y ago
  What my sibling said, but also, this almost happened. It's called "the mutapocalpyse". See here: http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/05/13/focusing-on-ownership/ http://smallcultfollowing.com/babysteps/blog/2014/05/13/focu... In the end, we decided that these are two equivalent perspectives, and decided to stick with the more traditional mutable/immutable distinction.